Hermeneutics

A Review of Goldingay’s “Do We Need the New Testament?

When I saw this volume advertised in the latest volume of BBR I knew I wanted to get my hands on it for a review. John Goldingay is professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, and is well-known for his recent three-volume Old Testament theology (1, 2, 3). His latest work is entitled Do We Need the New Testament? Letting the Old Testament Speak for Itself (2015). You can watch a 30-minute video here where Goldingay discusses the book at St. John’s College Nottingham.

Before getting to my review, the book is laid out as follows:

Introduction
1. Do We Need the New Testament?
2. Why is Jesus Important?
3. Was the Holy Spirit Present in First Testament Times?
4. The Grand Narrative and the Middle Narratives in the First Testament and the New Testament
5. How People Have Mis(?)read Hebrews
6. The Costly Loss of First Testament Spirituality
7. Memory and Israel’s Faith, Hope, and Life
8. Moses (and Jesus and Paul) for Your Hardness of Hearts
9. Theological Interpretation: Don’t Be Christ-Centered, Don’t Be Trinitarian, Don’t Be Constrained by the Rule of Faith
Conclusion

The Long and Short of It

The first sentence of this book says “Yes, of course, we do need the New Testament, but why?” (7). In a nutshell, Goldingay is concerned for a proper (Christian) understanding of the Old Testament (which he calls the “First Testament”), one which avoids common pitfalls such as thinking the OT portrays an angry God while the NT presents Jesus strictly as a peacemaker. In this sense, Goldingay addresses the “‘problem’ of the relationship of the Testaments,” which he does mostly in chapters 1 and 9, with the in-between content extrapolating some of his claims (9).

Chapter 1 is the place to go for the short answer to the book’s title-question. There, Goldingay reviews his reasoning for why we do need the NT, which he does largely to contrast common assumptions about the lesser “importance” of the OT. I am going to focus on this content for the most part.

Why We Need the New Testament

1) Salvation – The NT tells us (four times) about Jesus’s life, and then dwells on its implications. Jesus took God’s activity in the OT to its “logical and ultimate extreme … [since in the OT] God had been paying the price for his people’s attitude to him, sacrificing himself for his people, bearing its sin,” etc. (12). Goldingay boldly states that “the gospel did not open up any new possibilities to people; those possibilities were always there” (14). Yet Jesus was a “necessary” part of God’s plan for his people, which has been the same from the start, now acted out in a “public” manner (13-14).

2) Narrative – Goldingay understands the Old and New Testaments to be a unified story, but also affirms that they do not have to be read that way. In other words, the OT can stand alone and yet would still give us much of the theology that is often construed as specific to the NT. Goldingay acknowledges Richard Hayes’ idea that Jesus’ death and resurrection were “completely unpredictable” based on the OT alone, but goes on to observe (quite rightly) that Jesus himself seemed well aware of what was coming even if it was “largely unpredicted” on the basis of the OT narrative (15). Still, the NT continues the narrative in a valid and coherent way.

3) Mission – Again Goldingay emphasises continuity: God’s desire for mission was there from the beginning. God’s choice of Israel as his own people did not exclude Israel’s role in blessing the nations. We do not need the NT “becasue otherwise we would not realize that God cared about the whole world,” but the NT does dislodge God’s mission from a singular geographical people group and spread it to congregations throughout the world (19).

4) Theology – Goldingay is keen to point out that the OT does not portray God only as a God of wrath (certainly Jews don’t think so), but that it also emphasizes his compassion and mercy, the very mechanism for his sustained relationship with Israel. Goldingay puts it plainly: Jesus “does not offer a new revelation of God in the sense of a different revelation, but he does give people a fresh one, providing them with an unprecedentedly vivid embodiment of the revelation they had [already in the OT]” (21, emphasis added).

5) Resurrection Hope – In Goldingay’s view, the hope of God’s people for “a bigger end to come after our death, an end that will mean our rising to a new life, with new bodies – or our going to hell” is “confined to the New Testament” (23). Although there are slight hints of resurrection (the Tree of Life in Eden, and Daniel 12), the OT gives the impression that “this life is all we have,” followed by the murky and quasi-neutral realm of Sheol (ibid.). Jesus, no the other hand, speaks more about the afterlife (specifically Hell) than anyone.

6) Promise and Fulfillment – The OT understands some of God’s promises to have been fulfilled in its own timeframe, as does the NT (such as Jesus’ resurrection). Reading 2 Cor 1:20, Goldingay distinguishes between the promises of God that are fulfilled by Christ and those that are confirmed. Jesus, he says, did not fulfill every one of God’s promises, but did “back them up” to highlight that God was at work in Jesus (26).

7) Spirituality –  Goldingay again emphasizes the continuity of the NT with the OT, saying that the NT acknowledges and affirms the ways of worshipping and praying that appear in the OT and “draws our attention to them” (28). It does so by indicating how “memory is key to praise and prayer” (29; expanded in chs. 6-7).

8) Ethics – What Goldingay calls “memory” he says relates to ethics as well as spirituality, as it places obligations upon us. This idea is explored in chapter 8, but Goldingay wishes to highlight how in Jesus’ fulfillment of the Torah and Prophets he also fills them out or up, in some sense “working out their implications” (31). What he said did not scandalize his hearers because it was “new,” but because they did not wish to hear what they already knew (or should/could have known).

Positives and Negatives

In terms of negative aspects of the book, to me it read a bit disjointedly. Many chapters begin with a footnote stating that it was drawn from an earlier conference paper or going into another edited volume. This is normal, of course, but I think to some extent the book suffers from a lack of focus on its rather glaring title. For instance, chapter 7, while interesting, did not clearly contribute to the overall aim of the book, at least as I understood it. I expect that Goldingay’s comment on p. 9 may provide some insight on this: “I’m working on a book on biblical theology, and you could also see this book as a statement of the assumptions that lie behind that book.” For better or worse, then, Do We Need the New Testament? is apparently a kind of “workbench” for another book. That doesn’t detract from its value per se, but it does have a few rough edges from a coherence point of view.

There are several substantive issues that some will find problematic (myself included). Goldingay has some puzzling views on God’s role in the application of salvation. On the one hand, he seems to affirm free will when he states that God’s people become such by choosing to “commit themselves” to God (42), yet he also states that we “cannot control” the Spirit (60), and that Jesus chose Paul, not vice versa (42). More problematically, however, in election Goldingay says that God “does not have in mind individuals,” but rather a “body,” so that those who do not respond to the Gospel do not do so “because they were not selected” (86-87). Precisely who constitutes the body of God’s elect is “utterly negotiable” to Goldingay, and wherever people reject the Gospel, God will go on to “dangle the truth more attractively or more forcefully” in front of others (87). How God could “dangle truth forcefully” is unclear at best, and in general these statements muddy the waters in Goldingay’s chapter on the Spirit.

On the other hand, ironically Goldingay has some helpful points precisely regarding the Holy Spirit’s presence in the OT (ch. 3). He notes the word/concept distinction, and points out that Israel was certainly acquainted with the fruit of the Spirit in the lives of “ordinary men and women, not just people such as kings and prophets” (57).

Of course, Goldingay’s overall goal of inspiring laypeople and biblical scholars to read the OT with care and awareness is commendable.  Goldingay also raises intriguing concerns about the so-called Christological/Christocentric hermeneutical model(s), claiming that they can detract from the way in which the OT speaks to the knowledge of God (not just Jesus). His final chapter is worth a close read in this regard, and it will hopefully spur continued reflection on the important issues at hand. Nevertheless, I found myself much in agreement with Goldingay insofar as he emphasizes the revelational continuity of the Testaments, and the redemptive-historical inevitability of the person of Christ, an emphasis that I think is somewhat less clear in his Old Testament Theology trilogy.

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Thanks to InterVarsity Press for providing a review copy, which has not influenced my evaluation of the book.

Guest Post on Steve Walton’s Blog

Yesterday I posted as a guest over on Steve Walton’s blog, Acts and More. Steve is the Professorial Research Fellow in Theology at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, where he is involved with the Centre for Social-Scientific Study of the Bible, and supervises PhD students. He is also an honorary research fellow at Tyndale House, where I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Steve this year.

In my post, I discuss Nicholas King’s new translation of the entire bible, aptly entitled The Bible. Interestingly, King chose to translate the Greek Old Testament, so I link up my evaluation of his work with my series on modern translation projects of the Septuagint, especially NETS.

 

If you’re interested, check out the post on Steve’s blog, which you can find by clicking here.

 

 

LXX Translations Part II.1: BdA

La Bible d’Alexandrie – Post 1 of 2

9782204069014Quite a while back I began writing about modern Septuagint translation projects. As I explained there, my aim is to overview the methodologies of the four major modern language translations of the LXX, one of which I already discussed. These are:

1) NETS, 2) BdA, 3) LXX.D, and 4) LBG.

Today, we focus on number two, La Bible d’Alexandrie, which I will treat in two separate posts. I decided to cover BdA in a more extended format since BdA and NETS are best understood when set in contrast. With a brief intro to NETS in my former post, we are in a better position to understand it and BdA as well.

[As an aside, I’m pleased to announce that Cameron Boyd-Taylor, who was involved with the NETS project and is an advocate of the Interlinearity model, will be in the hotseat of one of my upcoming LXX Scholar Interviews.]

Textual Commentary

BdA is a French publication by Éditions du Cerf and is an ongoing project, although it has been in process for almost thirty years already. One of the reasons that it has taken so long – aside from maintaining a high standard of scholarly rigor and the dearth of qualified LXX specialists – is the inclusion of extended running commentary on the text throughout, both on the French translation and the Greek. Indeed, this is a primary difference from NETS, which only presents an English translation (although the IOSCS Septuagint Commentary Series will have a similar role in that respect, and NETS has a brief introduction to each biblical book).

Through the mechanism of the translation principles, discussed below, BdA aims in its commentary give three types of notes. Firstly, linguistic notes, dealing with text-criticism and their translation rationale. Secondly, exegetical notes, studying the divergences from the Hebrew and possible reasons for them. And thirdly, historical notes, discussing the later reception of the LXX text and its interpretation, particularly in the Apostolic Church and in early Jewish literature.

Furthermore, each volume includes a valuable introduction that discusses a given book’s composition, themes, and relationship to its source text.

Purpose and Translation Principles

Marguerite Harl states that the purpose of BdA is “to offer as exact a translation of the Greek text of the LXX as possible [in French],” which is driven by the conviction that the Septuagint has “importance and interest in its own right: it is a part of the Hellenistic Jewish literature” (Harl 2001, 181-82).

As such, BdA has four major guidelines/steps in producing its translation, the first two of which I will discuss below. I’ll treat the other two in a successive post.

1. Translation “according to the Greek”

This first principle is the most far-reaching, and is the primary foil to the NETS approach in two ways. Firstly, BdA aims for a translation that is “as literary as possible on the basis of syntactical and lexical usages of the Greek language current at the translators’ epoch” (ibid., 183). In other words, the (1) French translation of the (2) Greek translation of the (3) Hebrew text is done with reference to (2) the Greek language. This differs from NETS in that the NETS translation is done with attention primarily to (3) the Hebrew source text, at least in terms of syntax and semantics. Harl states baldly: “At this point we disregard the Hebrew source-text,” which is studied in the second stage of translation (ibid., emphasis mine).

Certainly not what the LXX translators looked like

Similarly, she states that “a text written in any language should be read and analysed only in the context of [its own] language” (ibid., 184). BdA sees the target language of a translation as a sort of window into the world of the translator and how he perceived his Hebrew source text when he translated it.

This approach contrasts distinctly with the Interlinear approach of NETS in a second important way. Whereas NETS perceives the LXX as a dependent text, intended to rely on the Hebrew source text for comprehensibility, BdA perceives the LXX as an independent text, meant from the start to be read as a free-standing text without the Hebrew as an aid to understanding. (Recall the distinction between text production and text reception, whereby the NETS group claims that the LXX only later came to be read as an independent text in the communities that received it.) From the BdA perspective, later revision and recension of “the” LXX was aimed to bring the Greek translation closer to the Hebrew source text, to make the Greek “sound” more like the Hebrew original. If that was in fact the case, they say, then it follows that the original translations were not necessarily concerned with (or perhaps successful in) representing the Hebrew in Greek, as NETS understands it.

Thus BdA assumes that the Greek of the Septuagint “makes sense” within its contemporary literary context despite its oddities, while on the other hand NETS begins with an assumption of “unintelligibility” of the Greek precisely because of its oddities (Boyd-Taylor 2011, 91). Both translation approaches identify the same characteristic of the LXX generally: it is not “typical” Greek (this depends on how one understands “typical” of course). But two of the modern translations – NETS and BdA – go very different directions as a result of that single observation. Favoring one approach over the other has to do with determining what deserves the weight of emphasis: the oddities or the conventionality of the Greek of the LXX within its linguistic context.

Connected with this alternative is the assumption of the relative competence or incompetence of the LXX translators – were their translational decisions driven by a lack of knowledge of Greek, or made deliberately (for whatever reason) from a position of language competence? BdA asumes that “they were competent and conscientious” translators who produced a text “if not easy to read, in any case, almost always of good ‘greekness'” (Harl 2001, 187).

Connection with Lexicography

This book was not available to the LXX translators

The question at hand is quite relevant to the issue of Septuagint lexicography. Should a word in the LXX be defined in terms of the meaning of the Hebrew word it represents, or in terms of its textual and linguistic context in Greek generally? Which meaning should be given preference if these options disagree, even if slightly? My research is concerned with determining the meaning of LXX words within the context of contemporary, non-literary Koine Greek. As such, I do not assume at the outset that a given Greek word is perfectly semantically aligned with the Hebrew word it translates. Instead, I take it that word meaning is determined by (1) that word’s usage in the language generally in extrabiblical Greek documents, by (2) its context in the LXX, and (3) by its use in other places within the LXX.

In other words, I tend to agree with BdA’s approach to the language of the LXX in general. Septuagint Greek is best understood with reference to Greek in general: first understand the Greek, then you can understand the Septuagint, and then you can investigate how it renders the Hebrew (and then you can approach the LXX as a text-critical witness … another topic for another day).

2. Establishing Divergencies

This is the second principle of BdA, which is really more of a second “step.” BdA does not assume that the Hebrew text from which the LXX was translated was identical with the Masoretic text in BHS. Rather, the LXX source text was a “proto-MT,” which “makes any comparison very difficult” (ibid. 190). The textual “plus” or “minus” in the Septuagint in comparison with the MT can be explained in any number of ways not necessarily related to translation technique and virtually impossible to substantiate. As Harl puts it (somewhat mind-bendingly), “A ‘plus’ of the LXX could be a word present in its Vorlage but omitted in the MT; a ‘minus’ in the LXX may be explained as an addition of the masorites” (ibid.).

Of course, it is precisely these differences between the LXX and the MT that have driven textual criticism for centuries, all the way back to Jerome himself. And the work is far from over. While “practically everywhere the Greek version attests the consonants of the MT,” the scriptio continua and unpointed text that was translated could have had several reading traditions, which may explain some of the differences (ibid.). Other times, however, as the Dead Sea Scrolls attest, there were legitimate points of difference in the Hebrew source text compared with what we have in BHS; points where the LXX and a Qumran scroll agree against the MT in a particular reading.

The payoff here for BdA is that they “do not speak a priori of the mistakes of the LXX but rather of exegetical options” (ibid., 191). In sum, the meaning of the MT is often obscure, and for that reason does not serve BdA as an arbiter of semantic divergences of the Greek text.

To be continued

This post being as long as it is, I’ll discuss the final two translation principles/steps of BdA in a second post.

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Boyd-Taylor, Cameron. Reading Between the Lines. Biblical Tools and Studies 8; Leuven: Peeters, 2011.

Harl, Marguerite. “La Bible d’Alexandrie I. The Translation Principles.” Pages 181-97 in X Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. Edited by B. A. Taylor. Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Series 51. Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001.